Is Copyright Holding Back Research?

from the but-of-course dept

When we write about copyright issues here, it's not uncommon for people to say "well, fine, if you don't like copyright, don't use it, but why do you care if others use it?" Indeed. If copyright didn't interfere with the rights of others, that would be a reasonable point. The problem, however, is that it quite frequently does interfere with all kinds of rights. Michael Scott points us to a recent study of communications professors, which determined that copyright quite frequently stifles or interferes with the research they're doing. One interesting aspect of this, however, is that it's often the perception of copyright law that is the problem:

A survey of communication scholars' practices, conducted by the Ad Hoc Committee on Fair Use and Academic Freedom in the International Communication Association (ICA), reveals that copyright ignorance and misunderstanding hamper distribution of finished work, derail work in progress, and most seriously, lead communication researchers simply to avoid certain kinds of research altogether.

Nearly half the respondents express a lack of confidence about their copyright knowledge in relation to their research. Nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions and a full fifth abandoned research already under way because of copyright concerns. In addition, many ICA members have faced resistance from publishers, editors, and university administrators when seeking to include copyrighted works in their research. Scholars are sometimes forced to seek copyright holders' permission to discuss or criticize copyrighted works. Such permission seeking puts copyright holders in a position to exercise veto power over the publication of research, especially research that deals with contemporary or popular media.

Now, one response to this might be that these professors need to be better educated on the boundaries, exceptions and limits to copyright law. However, it's not so simple. Part of the reason why there is so much fear of copyright law is because of the actions of many copyright holders, who not only aggressively push an extreme version of copyright law out to the public -- such as the MPAA's infamous (infamously wrong) "if you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it" education campaing -- but who have used ridiculously high statutory rates to publicize the idea that for very marginal copyright infringement, you may be liable for millions in damages awards (not counting legal fees).

The copyright holders themselves have been trying to paint this picture of copyright as being much more than it really is -- and as a result of that, it's now actively stifling all kinds of important research.

Reader Comments

Another Instance

BYU created an online searchable corpus of the English language dating back as far as the 1200's. The "Problem" was that they used texts from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to do so. As you can see on the page, the researchers at BYU tried to contact OED for several years, with no response until they received a takedown notice.

OED's reaction to BYU's creation of this corpus (which OED does not offer itself) has kept numerous linguistic researchers from having access to one of the more extensive corpora available, all because they have a "copyright" on data and documents, some of which date back over 800 years.